[jyl]

You also have to think about how police gunfights differ from citizen gunfights.

A police officer is not just shooting to defend himself. He has a duty to pursue, to press the attack, and to apprehend a suspect. He cannot let the suspect run off into the neighborhood.

A citizen will only be shooting to defend himself, aside from some extremely rare cases (e.g. the 100 yd shot mentioned by Rick). So citizen gunfights will, logically, be at shorter ranges, on average, than police gunfights.

More reason, I think, why CCW'ers should focus on practical accuracy at short ranges under very bad conditions.

Obviously, most of us like to shoot tight groups at 25 yds. We're having fun with target pistolery. There's many aspect to recreational shooting, they don't all have to be pertinent to CCW, let's not fool ourselves that they are.

(Did you notice there was one dataset where the hit ratio was compared to the officer's pistol qualification score? There wasn't any clear correlation. Meaning, the officers' skills with a 25 yd paper target did not correlate to their ability to actually hit the enemy in a gunfight.)